Watch Three Colors: White For Free

the audience applauded

Just perfect...

Awesome Movie

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS ABOUT THREE COLORS: BLUE AND THREE COLORS: REDBesides the fact that all the characters meet up on a ferry at the end of the film, there is one other thing that adjoins them, and that is the courtroom scene. Karol here is the man who does not want to let the divorce happen. The man from Red is the judge, and Julie - the girl from blue, peaks through the door for a second, looking for her ex-husband's lover. These three characters are apparently at some point before the ferry all together.Regarding this one... I liked it a lot. The protagonist here loves his wife but he can't have sex with her since they got married. In red, the judge says it's the stupidest thing to judge people because you can't really be in their shoes. So since he makes this decision, Karol is left homeless in the streets. Mikolaj, who is the man that offers to take Karel back to Poland is a really interesting character for me. Since when talking about this trio, I like discussing the theme of being stuck, I'd say Mikolay is the most stuck of them all. Because he has everything seemingly: money, wife, kids, yet he wants to die. And what gets him out of this vicious loop is the fact that Karol purposely shoots him with a smoke gun. He realizes that someone may actually care about him. And I think it's small things like this that make this film wonderful.White also stood out for me with its comedy. How five robbers are discussing how to share the luggage where one person is lying by himself... I think comedy really fit this character and setting, just as music fit Julie and mystery fit Valentine.

In the story of 'White', one of the segments as part of the "Three-Colors Trilogy" that capped off the career of Kieslowski (this was released second after 'Blue', just before 'Red'), Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski) is married to Dominique (Julie Delpy), but at the start of the film they're getting a divorce. What harm exactly did he do to her? We don't quite know. All we can really gleam is that he loves her passionately but, you know how the "Golddiggers" song goes, huh fellas? This is not to say that this film is misogynistic, or rather I don't think that is really Kieslowski's game with the satire here - and make no mistake, this is as biting satire (and out-and-out comedy) as it can get for such a director. While Dominique is conniving - she leaves poor Karol with nothing but a suitcase, and despite him trying to get her back he turns up (in more ways than one) flaccid. Can he win her back some how? He's still crazy about her - he even buys a statue that looks remarkably like her to keep by his side.Through a rather crazy set of circumstances, which include meeting another Polish man in France who wants him to commit a murder for money (a lot of it) and then finding a way back to Poland by, you guessed it, stuffing himself inside of a suitcase (sure, it gets stolen and he's beaten up by the thieves, but it's the price to pay for getting back to Poland). He tries to build himself back up, and does by chance and ingenuity - and screwing over other crooks before they get the chance to steal people of their land - and all of this is really to do one thing: find a way to get Dominique back into his life. How will this be done? By some unlikely means necessary.A couple of points in White, perhaps mid-way through, seemed a little slow when the film wasn't sure quite what to do with Karol. What is he doing back in Wasaw exactly? Where will this story be going to? And, most confusingly, why does Delpy's Dominique pop up - randomly, to my point of view - two times in the middle of the film, just clips of scenes of her later on in the film? Kieslowski is much more sly in this film than he is in Blue or Red, films that dealt on more concrete terms about existential anxiety and about not connecting with people after traumas of lapses in connection (re Binoche, who randomly pops up in a bling-and-you'll miss cameo and Trintignant).I think the key to me came after seeing the film and noticing a reviewer comparing Kieslowski's approach as a critique of capitalism in the modern age. Before reading that, White was an entertaining film but, comparatively, "light" in what it has to offer. It is all still a divorcée-con-job story, with overtones in the third act of, of all things, The Third Man in its trickery of a character playing dead. But what does carry over in this film - which features its title color revealed at moments of revelation, the wedding dress Delpy wears, and an actual climactic "moment" - is the humor and commentary on a society picking itself up, as Poland was, in the days of the end of Communist rule. I wish I had put that context more for when I was watching it, and maybe on a re-watch it will be more interesting with that in mind.If it does keep from being great overall, it may be because it's a little too... short, in a way. A part of me wishes there was just a scene or two more development of Karol/Dominique's relationship, but on the other hand it's easy to see why Kieslowski keeps it to what it is: love that is more about need and desire than full-on compatibility, on both sides.It goes by in a brisk 90 minutes, and Delpy is there for all of 20 minutes, tops (her appearance on the cover is more for advertisement purposes). When she does appear in the film, her character is raw and duplicitous at first, but strangely vulnerable when it comes to her sorta comeuppance when she really returns. In this midsection, and really our hero, we have Zamachowski, and he is terrific and funny and sad and all sort of things as this hapless guy who knows he loves his wife, even (especially) when he's enacting his obsessive-revenge-type of response to her rejection of him. If there was ever an American remake - not that one should want it, but hypothetically - Paul Giamatti would fit the role perfectly. He's an average, shlubby every-man who is three dimensional: likable, unlikable, fairly slick one minute and idiotic the next.For a director who is often looked at as having very "Heavy" films, and for good reason, a film like Three Colors: White is, for lack of a better word, fun, and it's enjoyable mostly to see the director work in such a mood - though the ending turns out to be rather tragic in what it suggests will come for these characters' double crossings.

Second of a trilogy of films dealing with contemporary French society shows a Polish immigrant (Zbigniew Zamachowski) who wants to get even with his former wife (Julie Delpy).Apparently, the film has a political subtext, in which Karol's impotence and financial helplessness in France, and subsequent rise as a somewhat shady capitalist, mirror the attempts of Poland to advance from its disadvantaged position within Europe. Was this intentional? Perhaps. But it is certainly one way to read the film."Three Colors: White "was met with critical acclaim by film critics, but is considered by many to be the weakest of the trilogy; it holds a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, while the first and third films hold 100% ratings. 90% is nothing to get upset about.

The story was nice but lacks a tight grip and feels unbelievable at times. The weakest point however, in my opinion, is the characters. Karol was nice but I couldn't understand his motives completely and couldn't sympathize with him. As for Dominique, there was not enough character development to understand better who she is. White felt less arty. It does have the camera concentration on object and the returning motive of recycling tin, but not as noticeable. Instead it had a richer plot and slightly more characters. White was never boring, but I didn't have any excitement watching it. The ending left me puzzled as to what Karol wanted to achieve.In summary: above average, but not exciting. When comparing to the other two, it looks like an estranged sibling.